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Monday, December 3, 2012

Another UTLA Sell-Out on VAM

Most people
would argue that teachers should be evaluated based on how well they teach and
help their students to grow academically. The problem is that there is no
accurate or consistent method of measuring the teacher impact on student
academic growth. High stakes state and NCLB tests are particularly ill-suited
for this.

Nevertheless,
a growing number of school districts across the nation are either imposing
Value-Added Measures (VAM) of teacher “effectiveness” on their teaching staffs,
or forcing them to accept student test scores as part of their evaluations in
exchange for other concessions like raises and maintaining benefits. VAM, which
attempts to calculate teachers’ impact on their students’ improvement on
standardized tests, has been shown to be inaccurate and unreliable (see here,
here
and here).

Los Angeles
Unified School District (LAUSD) has been under court order to reform its
evaluation system. The ruling by Judge James Chalfant mandated that LAUSD
comply with the state’s Stull Act, which requires that some measures of student
academic progress be factored into the evaluations, though the law does not
specify what kind of student data must be used. This has led to a protracted
battle with United Teacher of Los Angeles (UTLA) over what kind of data will be
used and to what extent.

Last Friday,
the two sides came to an agreement on a new evaluation system that will include
student test data. The evaluations will use both local and state standardized
test scores, but there is no agreement yet on how much the test scores will
count toward teachers’ evaluations. Superintendent John Deasy hailed the
agreement as a victory for labor-management collaboration, while UTLA President
Warren Fletcher was simply grateful the accord didn’t give LAUSD more than it
did, according to John
Fensterwald, writing for Ed Source. The agreement must still be approved by
the school board and ratified by the UTLA membership.

Deasy had
been pushing for a method called Academic
Growth Over Time (AGT), a type of VAM that supposedly controls for external
factors like students’ past test results and background. UTLA rightly opposed
AGT as unsound, which it is. The agreement does not permit the AGT scores of
individuals to be used in their evaluations, though school-level AGT can be
used as one of several factors. Additionally, individual AGT scores will become
part of teachers’ confidential personnel files, no longer accessible to the
public or the press.

While this
latter stipulation could be spun as a win for teachers, the fact that student
test data is being used to evaluate teachers at all should be seen as a serious
blow to both students and teachers. The use of student test data to evaluate
teachers is terrible for students precisely because it does nothing to improve
teacher quality, while potentially forcing many good teachers out of the
profession because of its unreliability and inconsistency. Furthermore, it
encourages the continued use of high stakes standardized exams, which take away
class time from real learning, encourage teaching to the test, and
unnecessarily increase the stress and anxiety children already face at school.